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The face of movie comedy was changed forever by Mel Brooks’s raucous but affectionate spoof of old-fashioned Hollywood westerns, and for that reason alone Blazing Saddles belongs in every DVD home library. Writer-director Brooks not only lampooned the hoariest horse opera clichés in this 1974 romp, he also challenged the self-censorial political correctness then just beginning to creep into Hollywood films. The justifiably notorious campfire scene, which some critics decried as unnecessarily coarse and vulgar, heralded a veritable flood of movie gags involving bodily functions. By today’s standards, the flatulent frontiersmen seem pretty tame. But after 30 years, what still startles is the frequent and all-too-casual use of the n-word to describe Cleavon Little’s character, the former railroad worker appointed as sheriff of Rock Ridge, a town beset by rustlers and bad guys working for a corrupt government official (Harvey Korman). Racial slurs aside, the laughs come fast and furious as the sheriff combats range ruffians with the aid of a drunken gunfighter (Gene Wilder, stealing nearly every scene he’s in) and a leggy femme fatale (Madeline Kahn, in a hilarious takeoff on the saloon girl played by Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again). Blazing Saddles and its successor, the Brooks-directed Young Frankenstein, forever changed the way Hollywood looked at itself. These no-holds-barred comedies, with their sophomoric innuendoes and self-referential excesses, remain templates for filmmakers who specialize in parody. Blazing Saddles, the first and more daring of the two, still has the power to raise eyebrows and drop jaws, three decades after its big-screen debut. Based on what has followed in its wake, that’s pretty amazing. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Vulgar, crude, and occasionally scandalous in its racial humor, this hilarious bad-taste spoof of Westerns, co-written by Richard Pryor, features Cleavon Little as the first black sheriff of a stunned town scheduled for demolition by an encroaching railroad. Little and co-star Gene Wilder have great chemistry, and the delightful supporting cast includes Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, and Madeline Kahn as a chanteuse modelled on Marlene Dietrich. As in Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety (1977), director/writer Mel Brooks gives a burlesque spin to a classic Hollywood movie genre; in his own manic, Borscht Belt way, Brooks was a central player in revising classic genres in light of Seventies values and attitudes, an effort most often associated with such directors as Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich . Some of this film's sequences, notably a gaseous bean dinner around a campfire, have become comedy classics. Robert Firsching

Product Details

• UPC: 085391895923
• Source: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby AC-3 Surround Sound
• Language: Español, English
• Editions: Special Edition, Subtitled, Dubbed
• Time: 1:33:00
• Sales Rank: 220

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Mel Brooks Collection
• Best of Blu-Ray, Vol. 3
• Mel Brooks Collection

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